Motion planning of a 7-axis robot manipulator via Modified Tension Spline and convex optimization

A motion planning scheme that combines the advantage of Modified Tension Spline and a convex optimization framework to accomplish the path planning and path tracking stage, respectively, is compared through simulation results and tested on a 7-axis robot. The flexibility of the convex optimization framework is shown through removing and adding new constraints or objective function according to robot model availability and different desired feature of the trajectory. More accurate constraints can be adapted when the dynamic robot model is more complete. In this paper, we use the convex optimization approach due to its well-known modeling flexibility and computational efficiency, and evaluate the performance of different criteria from the kinematic constraints of robot manipulators.